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Can Better Communication of Climate Science Cut Climate Risks?

Over the weekend I noticed a clever new effort to visualize how natural climate variability interacts with the heating effect from accumulating greenhouse gases – made by Teddy TV and the animator Ole Christoffer Haga for the 10-part math series Siffer on Norway’s NRK channel*:

I’ve always liked Gell-Mann’s focus on the importance, in such situations, of taking a “crude look at the whole.” While I never did any climate science, my vantage point as a journalist covering global warming since the 1980s gave me the ability to do just that – from fieldwork in Greenland to simulations at supercomputing centers, from the North Pole to the White House.

We talked about a lot of things, including the loss of public support for climate legislation. Gell-Mann repeatedly wondered why the media and others communicating science had failed to counter attacks on climate science based on the recent lack of warming by laying out the basic reality of the building greenhouse effect.

Here’s the video (above) and a transcribed excerpt of our chat (below):

Gell-Mann: Is it really, really so extremely difficult to persuade people that climate, which is average weather, can have three contributions that add to one another? That is, some cyclical effects, some random noise and a secular steadily rising trend from human activity?

Revkin: I spent 20 years focused on the basic physics and geoscience of this… But I’ve spent the last five or six years focused on the social science. How we perceive problems, how we respond, or don’t. And global warming is the world’s worst problem in that sense. It has all the elements that make it the kind of thing we don’t, as a public or individuals, really engage on.

Gell-Mann: Can people really not grasp this trivially simple idea? That you have the sum of these three terms, and if we wait until the secular term, the anthropogenic term, gets really, really big, until it drowns out the other two, is that really so hard to explain?

I mentioned a variety of attempts to do that, including a piece that, by chance, ran on my blog the day of our chat – “Hot Weather in a Warming Climate,” I added a comparison.

Revkin: There are many examples of a problem that’s looming in plain sight with a [foreboding] trajectory – the housing bubble – and then it happens and we say, How did that happen?

Gell-Mann: Isn’t it just an arithmetic problem, just the idea that you’re taking the sum of three terms and they behave differently?

Revkin: The numbers are there and they can be displayed in many vivid ways… It’s like with the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. Four times over 20 years they’ve come out with reports that progressively have built this body of understanding…

Gell-Mann: …Always very conservative…

Revkin: Yes, but with a nice solid trajectory toward more confidence. And I think there’s an expectation among the scientific community that, well, okay the fifth one will do it. We’ll get it over this point where finally people will get it.

Gell-Mann: But the thing I was talking about is not the whole issue, just this trivial point about the sum of the three terms — the random fluctuations, the cyclical behavior. Because the deniers talk about the cycles, and they are right. There are cycles. And there are random terms. And there is also the secular term. I don’t understand why people who are supposed to educate the public cannot get this across?

I consider this post yet another attempt. I think that videos like the one above can help clarify what’s going on, and will be helpful in classrooms, particularly. They might help the human species go to “risk school.”

But, as I explained to Gell-Mann then, I don’t see better communication, on its own, being remotely sufficient to set the world on a course to shift swiftly from the fuels of convenience — coal and oil — even as human numbers and resource appetites crest.

The challenge, of course, is that a science-based definition of the “climate crisis” (I still think that climate scientist Richard Somerville defined that term best in a 2007 debate with Michael Crichton and others) is not the kind of message that will get people rushing to the ramparts.

There’s a coda to the conversation with Gell-Mann in which I propose a way to get traction on a shift toward new energy norms despite the unavoidable public detachment from climate change, on its own terms. Have a listen and weigh in.

Correction: January 13, 2012* I initially mis-spelled ("Siffa") and mischaracterized the Norwegian (not Danish!) production for which the animation was created. It is not a television program; it is a series. Apologies -- and thanks -- to the commenter Minomusi for pointing out the error.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.